Housekeeping
Bronte Heron
Every morning my mother leaves
to meet the other women
she swims with. It makes her feel alive,
she says, to brave the cold
like that, to dive under water
while the rest of us are still sleeping.
She arrives home as I’m getting up,
sand through her clothes and hair,
already in her day’s rhythm—
breakfast and whatever else
comes next. We often say that
she’s in her own world
when we talk about the parts of her
we can’t reach. When she loses herself
in her thoughts, objects start to move
of their own accord, finding themselves
in unexpected places. There was a photo
of her once, wedged inside a cookbook,
captured by a lover while they were on holiday
in the eighties. I don’t remember, she tells me
whenever I ask about her life
before she had us, as if by keeping it secret
she can hold it more closely.
I try to imagine what it was like,
as I do when she wades out towards her friends,
their towels cast off on the beach behind them.